Lien Bich Luu's important book addresses the role of the many late sixteenth-century “strangers” from the Netherlands and France in the development of early modern London as a center of manufacture and industry. It is a product of prodigious reading in theoretical works on economic development and studies of the social and economic history of early modern Europe, as well as research in the archives of London, Antwerp, and Brussels. The late sixteenth century is clearly the focus of her study, despite a few nods to the later Huguenot immigration of the late seventeenth century, and the main scaffolding of the work is her own database analysis of the Elizabethan “Returns of Aliens,” a series of censuses (six between 1568 and 1593) of the stranger population in London. She imaginatively complements this source, whose shortcomings she clearly sets out for her readers, with an examination of records of the London livery companies, of the City of London government, of the “Council of Troubles” in the Netherlands, and of the Goldsmiths’ Guild of Antwerp in order to provide as complete a profile as possible of the origins and changing fortunes of the immigrant population in Elizabethan London.

Elizabethan contemporaries often commented on the contributions the strangers made to English manufacture and industry, and older economic historians such as William Cunningham and Ephraim Lipson have more often than not merely repeated these statements without much question. Luu sets out to assess the truth of such assertions, and in particular to examine the process, personnel, and chronology of these developments and the dynamics of the “technology transfer” the immigrants are supposed to have effected. In her introduction (chap. 1), Luu sets out the terms of the inquiry and discusses the literature and sources on which she has based her study. She then addresses the demographic and economic changes that led to London's role as a center of production and consumption (chap. 2) and the government-sponsored programs to encourage the immigration and employment of skilled foreign workmen (chap. 3). The following two chapters present us with, in turn, a largely quantitative exposition of the results of Luu's analysis of the Returns of Aliens for 1571 and 1593 (the two most detailed), with information on the size, origins, motives, occupations, and settlements of the stranger population in London and, in the fifth chapter, a discussion of the ambiguous reception the strangers met with in London, where they were supported as suffering Protestant brethren on one hand while being attacked as economic migrants come to steal work from the natives on the other.

Luu's work is most revelatory in the case studies with which she ends her book, in which she treats the role of the strangers and the course of the diffusion of technology in three manufactures in which immigrants are thought to have had an important or deciding influence—silk weaving, silversmithing, and beer brewing. It is in these chapters that she rewardingly complicates our view of the role of immigration in economic development by showing that there is not one model of “technology diffusion” implemented by one monolithic group of “immigrants.” Each of these trades involved different types of immigrant workers and had their own chronologies and rates and processes of diffusion. The growth of the silk trade, for example, was largely dependent on continuous waves of mass immigration of refugees, as in the late sixteenth century and again with the Huguenots in the late seventeenth. She shows that in Elizabethan London the refugees from the Walloon provinces of the Netherlands clearly dominated the silk working trade. In 1571 they made up 9 percent of the alien population but constituted 30 percent of alien silk workers. Furthermore, many, perhaps most, did not come to England already knowledgeable of the craft but were driven to practice this trade by necessity and opportunity (i.e., high domestic demand with little supply from English manufacturers) and learned the required skills through the associations that compatriots forged in the areas of dense immigrant settlement and the social contacts afforded by the stranger churches. She posits a further step to make our view of technology transfer more sophisticated, where skilled members of the immigrant population need to teach the techniques to fellow immigrants first before they can pass their knowledge on to the native population. Another model, however, is afforded by silversmithing, where she emphasizes the long dominance of alien influences up to the mid-eighteenth century, owing to the nature of the demand, from elites who valued silver goods of foreign style and craftsmanship, and the important role in the workforce of the transient and cheap young continental apprentices who came to England to work for a short period of time as part of their wanderjahre training before returning to become master smiths in their home countries. Yet another story is told in the section on beer brewing, which in the early sixteenth century was almost entirely in the hands of wealthy and long-established Dutch brewers, who made the beverage principally for consumption among their compatriots until, through the growing demand for beer among the poorer levels of the English population, the resultant increased economies of scale, and the restrictive policies of the Brewers Company, the Dutch brewers were slowly squeezed out, so that by the mid-seventeenth century beer production was almost entirely in the hands of the English.

The book is clearly and efficiently written, although, owing to the author's brief and the sources relied on, the immigrants themselves seldom come alive as individuals and seldom speak in their own words. It is well produced, but the author has been let down by her publisher in that nine of her previous articles on this topic are listed in the extensive bibliography under the name of the author who precedes her alphabetically (342–43). Luu rightly concludes at the end of her study that immigration conferred on early modern London “social assets,” “creating a diversity of cultures, encouraging the constant infusion of new blood and movements of people, and discouraging insularity and complacency” (308). These are salutary and encouraging words that are as pertinent to today's London as they are to the metropolis of the sixteenth century.